Wrong Door

I’ve got a long history of getting confused. One of the stories I’ve told and retold in different circumstances to different ends is a story from the early eighties about opening the wrong door.

A local Bakersfield “punk” band was playing at a place I’d never been before called Sam’s Pizza Boat. Since Bakersfield is in the middle of desert of sorts, the term “boat” should have been some clue to the difficulty of locating it. At first, it seemed really simple—they had a large sign on the street. But I had to park some distance away, and as I was walking up I saw what looked like an entry door on the same building, so I opened it.

The music stopped. Every head in the building turned to view my long haired person. I could see the shining belt buckles, and hear the twang of the steel guitars. It was a country bar. This was long before country became dominated by “outlaws” and my presence was enough to stop everyone in their tracks. It was like a scene from a bad western movie. I slowly backed out of the door without any sudden moves, the music resumed and the cowboys went back to their business.

I walked around the corner and went in the correct door to the pizza place, and the rest of the evening went pretty well. The interesting thing about Sam’s was the way the crowd surged in the tiny place. It became so jammed in the pit that people would literally pop-up in the middle and end up crowd surfing whether they liked it or not. At that point, the band would stop, and the management would put on heavy metal music like AC/DC to get people to calm down. The band would start again, and then the process would repeat usually after a single song. I found the whole enterprise quite amusing.

I walked in the wrong door last night, but it turned out better.

I wanted to see Mike Watt and the Secondmen. The club was called Seventh Street Entry, and so deducing that there would be an entry on Seventh Street I walked down that way. There was a line of people, and being a good lemming, I stood in it. The line wrapped around the street onto First Avenue. It turned out to be a line to see P.J. Harvey. The music didn’t stop when I walked in. I did find an entry to the other club on the inside (I really don’t know how their system works, both clubs are in the same building), but there didn’t seem to be much point in going any further. It was a great show anyway.